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The trail had been cold for years when the FBI announced in
2010 that it had sent crime scene evidence from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum to its lab for retesting, hoping advances in DNA analysis
would identify the thieves who stole $500 million worth of
masterpieces.
But behind the scenes, federal investigators
searching for a break in the world’s largest art theft were stymied by
another mystery. The duct tape and handcuffs that the thieves had used
to restrain the museum’s two security guards — evidence that might, even
27 years after the crime, retain traces of DNA — had disappeared.
The FBI, which collected the crime scene evidence after the heist,
lost the duct tape and handcuffs, according to three people familiar
with the investigation. Despite an exhaustive internal search, the FBI
has been unable to find the missing evidence, thwarting its plan to
analyze it for potential traces of the thieves’ genetic material,
according to those people, who asked not to be identified because they
are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
It’s unclear
when the items vanished — although two people said they have been
missing for more than a decade — and whether they were thrown away or
simply misfiled, the people said.

The lost evidence marks another setback in an ongoing investigation
that has been plagued by the deaths of suspects, defiant mobsters,
fruitless searches, and a litany of dashed hopes. None of the 13 stolen
treasures, which include masterpieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt, have
been recovered, and no one has been charged.
The FBI declined to comment on the missing evidence, citing the
ongoing investigation, but defended its handling of the case. Harold H.
Shaw, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, said the
bureau has devoted significant resources to the investigation, chased
leads around the world, and remains committed to recovering the artwork.
“The
investigation has had many twists and turns, promising leads and dead
ends,” Shaw said. “It has included thousands of interviews and
incalculable hours of effort.”
The FBI completed DNA analysis of some museum evidence in 2010,
according to Kristen Setera, an FBI spokeswoman. She declined to say
what items were tested or what, if anything, the tests showed.
The
heist remains one of Boston’s greatest mysteries. Promising leads have
led nowhere, leaving investigators at a crossroads. Most notably, a
seven-year effort to pressure a Connecticut mobster for information has
come up empty.
Robert Gentile, 80, faces sentencing in August on
gun charges but could walk free if he cooperated with federal
authorities, his lawyer said. Despite the enticement, and a hefty
reward, Gentile denies knowing anything about the stolen artwork.
Finding
the treasures may require a new approach, according to several former
law enforcement officials who worked on the case. They suggested that
investigators should restart the investigation from scratch and review
the evidence in a contemporary light.
Carmen Ortiz, who recently stepped down as US attorney for
Massachusetts, said authorities should shift their strategy, perhaps to
include appeals on social media, and expand the investigative team.
“Get
around the table with some fresh eyes, in addition to those who know
this case very well, to give it a new look,” Ortiz said. Ortiz’s
successor, Acting US Attorney William Weinreb, said the investigation
remains a top priority.
A former assistant US attorney, Robert
Fisher, who oversaw the Gardner investigation from 2010 to 2016, said
investigators should “go back to square one” and study the crime as if
it just happened, analyzing each piece of evidence with the latest DNA,
fingerprint, and video technology.
“What if it happened last
night, what would we do this morning to try to crack this case?” said
Fisher, an attorney at Nixon Peabody.
Told that the Globe had
learned the duct tape and handcuffs left behind by the thieves were now
missing, Fisher said he hoped they would be found.
“Frankly, it
could be enormously helpful,” Fisher said of the missing items. “I think
present-day forensic analysis of evidence like that could lead to a
break in the case.”
However, he said the tape may yield no viable DNA, depending on its condition.
Anthony
Amore, the museum’s security director, said investigators are pursuing a
number of new leads following last month’s announcement that the reward
for information leading to the recovery of the artwork had doubled to
$10 million until year’s end. Dozens of tips were received, he said.
“I
operate in the realm of hope,” said Amore, who has worked with the FBI
and US attorney’s office on the investigation for nearly 12 years. “We
are never going to stop looking for these paintings.”
The brazen heist — the largest property crime in US history — occurred in the early morning hours of March 18, 1990. Two
thieves disguised as police officers claimed to be investigating a
disturbance when they showed up at the museum’s side door on Palace Road
in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood. They were buzzed inside by a
23-year-old security guard, who, by his own admission, has never been
eliminated as a suspect.
The thieves wrapped duct tape around the
hands, eyes, and mouths of the two guards on duty, then left them
handcuffed in the museum’s basement as they spent 81 minutes slashing
and pulling masterpieces from their frames.
In the days after the
robbery, FBI and Boston police crime scene analysts scoured the museum
for clues. They lifted partial fingerprints from the empty frames but
found no matches in the FBI database.
At the time, DNA evidence was in its infancy. But scientific advances
have since opened new doors for investigators, cracking unsolved cases
across the country.
DNA experts said it’s possible the thieves’ DNA couldbe
pulled from the duct tape, although the chances are slim. Success
hinges on a number of variables, such as how the evidence was preserved
and how many people handled it while freeing the guards and storing it.
“Certainly
people have retrieved DNA from samples that old, but how much you can
get is the big question,” said Robin Cotton, director of the Biomedical
Forensic Sciences Program at the Boston University School of Medicine.
Analysts
would also need DNA samples from the police officers who removed the
tape to distinguish their DNA from the thieves, Cotton said.
Tom
Evans, scientific director of the DNA Enzymes Division at New England
Biolabs, an Ipswich firm that conducts DNA testing, said technology has
come so far that it may take only a single cell to identify someone
through DNA analysis. But DNA breaks down over time, especially in hot
or humid conditions.
“Twenty-seven years later, it might work and it might fail,” Evans said.
The
statute of limitations on the theft expired years ago, but authorities
could still bring criminal charges for hiding or transporting the stolen
artwork. The US attorney’s office has offered immunity in exchange for
the return of the paintings.
Four years ago, the FBI announced it
was confident it had identified the thieves — local criminals who have
since died — and had determined that the stolen artwork traveled through
organized crime circles from Boston to Connecticut to Philadelphia,
where the trail went cold around 2003.
In 2010, the FBI began
focusing on Gentile after the widow of another person of interest in the
theft, Robert Guarente, told agents that her late husband had given two
of the stolen paintings to Gentile before he died in 2004.
Federal
authorities allege that Gentile offered to sell some of the stolen
paintings to an undercover FBI agent in 2015 for $500,000 apiece. They
remain convinced that he is holding back what he knows.
However,
Gentile’s lawyer, A. Ryan McGuigan, said his client insists he has
nothing to offer investigators and recently told him, “They could make
the reward $100 million and it wouldn’t change anything because there
ain’t no paintings.”
Another person who has come under renewed
scrutiny in recent years is Richard Abath, the guard who opened the door
for the thieves. A Berklee College of Music dropout who played in a
rock ’n’ roll band while working at the museum, he has steadfastly
maintained that he played no role in the heist.
Authorities have
said that motion sensors that recorded the thieves’ steps as they moved
through the museum indicate they never entered the first-floor gallery
where Manet’s “Chez Tortoni” was stolen. Only Abath’s steps, as he made
his rounds before the thieves arrived, were picked up there, they have
said.
Steve Keller, a security consultant hired by the museum,
said he tested the motion sensors after the theft and determined they
were reliable. He said he entered and left the room several times where
the Manet had been stolen, even crawling on his hands and knees in an
effort to avoid detection. Each time the sensors detected his presence.
Abath declined to comment.
Former
US attorney Brian T. Kelly, who previously oversaw efforts to recover
the Gardner artwork, said he remains hopeful the masterpieces will be
recovered.
“All it takes is a new lead that leads in a new direction and a lucky break or two,” Kelly said.Shelley Murphy can be reached at shelley.murphy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @shelleymurph. Stephen Kurkjian can be reached at stephenkurkjian@gmail.comArt Hostage Comments:
So many false leads, controlled oposition etc.
The FBI insist any Gardner art recovery is done on their terms and includes arrests/indictments etc.
The Gardner Museum has also been bullied into towing the line therefore
any reward includes conditions that allows refusal of reward payment,
for example the insistance on all the art work being recovered in "Good
condition" before any reward would be paid out.

The museum’s trustees also felt they were being kept in the dark about
the status of the investigation. Trustee Francis W. Hatch, Jr. recalled
one meeting held ostensibly to gain a briefing from the agent and
supervisor on the case. “They wouldn’t tell us anything about what they
thought of the robbery
or who they considered suspects,” Hatch recalls. “It was
very embarrassing to all of us.”

"Hatch
convinced the trustees that the museum needed to hire a fi rm to
investigate, and stay in touch with the FBI on its probe. IGI, a private
investigative firm based in Washington begun by Terry Lenzner, who had
cut his teeth as a lawyer for the Senate Watergate Committee, was put on
retainer, and the executive assigned to the case was Larry Potts, a
former top
deputy in the FBI. Fearful that their authority was being undercut, the FBI’s
supervisors
in Boston complained to US attorney Wayne Budd, who fired off a memo
warning the museum that it faced prosecution if it withheld information
relevant to the investigation. Hatch responded, saying in his letter
that he
was “shocked and saddened” by Budd’s attempt to “intimidate”
the museum and that it cast “a pall over future cooperative efforts.”
From Master Thieves by Stephen Kurkjian

Wow! It's almost as if one of the thieves was untouchable,
like because he was the star witness testifying in a German court in absentia
against the ringleader of the longest running spy ring in American history,
Clyde Lee Conrad, and was also implicating himself and two other spies he
himself had recruited, at that time, like Boston area native Rod Ramsay, or
somebody like that.

"In
addition, more than thirty paintings, valued at $200 million, that
Imelda Marcos had allegedly purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of
Manila, including works by Rubens, El Greco, Picasso, and Degas, were
being stored by Khashoggi for the Marcoses, but it turned out that the
pictures had been sold to Khashoggi as part of a cover-up. The art
treasures were first hidden on his yacht and then moved to his penthouse
in Cannes. The penthouse was raided by the French police in a search
for the pictures in April 1987, but it is believed that Khashoggi had
been tipped off. He turned over nine of the paintings to the police,
claiming to have sold the others to a Panamanian company, but
investigators believe that he sold the pictures back to himself. The
rest of the loot is thought to be in Athens. If he is found guilty, such
charges could get him up to ten years in an American slammer."

Some of the Gardner art may have reached the Middle East, making it much harder to recover.
Some of the Gardner art may be in terrible condition preventing any
recovery because any reward would be negated by this, see Gardner
museums conditions of recovery in "Good condition"

The Gardner case has been a political tug of war, with all sides refusing to give an inch.Food for thought:
If they believe the thieves are deceased why did they only just recently
stipulate that the thieves are not eligible for the reward?

From this article: "Plagued by the deaths of suspects,
defiant mobsters."

Beat that local toughs theory into the ground Boston Globe. Last month the FBI
said the know who the guy in the video is, but they're not saying if he was
there for a legitimate reason or not. So obviously he wsa there for an
illegitimate reason. And he most certainly is not a local tough so the whole
local tough or any kind of mafia type theory is thoroughly discredited.

Abath has no known associations with local toughs and this guy talking to ABath
is not a local tough or any kind of mafia type. Kurkjian reported in November
of 2015 that four security guards said it was retired Lt. Colonel and Gardner
Security supervisor Larry O'Brian, which is ridiculous, but it points to the fact
that by his haircut, clothing, and comportment, this was a guy who could be
mistaken for a security supervisor. Could Donati, or DiMuzio, or Reissfelder,
be mistaken for a security supervisor by security guards on a surveillance
video? I don't think so.

There has never been a scintilla of evidence supporting that theory. The whole
theory was just a full employment for program FBI agents and their friends in
journalism. And the dead suspects were just convenient props who would not be
able to stand up for themselves, be publicly vetted or file a lawsuit.

Notice that Mashberg doesn't say they look like the police sketches. Nor does
Kelly get quoted saying that. How absurd? It's like trying to translate the
Soviet house organ Pravda into Russian.

In the Globe's article about the Powerpoint 3/17/15, a couple of weeks later,
Shelley Murphy, evidently couldn't bring herself to mention Leonard DiMuzio by
name. Can you blame her? DiMuzio, the victim of an unsolved homicide, was an
honorably discharged Marine Corp corporal, and a Viet Nam vet. He does NOT
resemble the police sketch. The New York Times described him as a
"skillful burglar" which probably means they had not caught him yet.

Reissfelder, a bad check writer, who liked to talk like a tough guy spent 16
years in prison for a robbery/murder he did not commit and was exonerated.
After he got out in 1982, he slept with the lights on.

But get ready for the real "CATCH" from this article by Murphy about
Reissfelder

"The catch: Reissfelder was 50 at the time of the heist, and the guards
estimated one thief was in his late 20s to early 30s and the other was in his
30s. However, Kelly said he doesn’t believe the age estimates were
reliable."

So Kelly says he thinks that two guys in their twenties one a 27 year old with
a Master's Degree from the New England Conservatory can't differentiate between
someone in their 30's and a 51 year old drug addict who had spent half of his
adult life in Walpole State Prison.

And Robert Gentile is the only "defiant" mobster. He says he didn't
do it. Stephen Kurkjian says he wasn't involved. Kurkjian's name is on this
article. How is Gentile's defiance any kind of "plague?"

The I.T. Revolution did not end yesterday morning and it is not ending tomorrow
morning. Get real. The paintings may or may not come back but the truth about
who did it is coming out. It was not local toughs.

The Boston FBI conducted the "investigation" the
way they were told from higher up, in Washington from the beginning. It's time
for Washington to leave Boston alone on this now.

“The place is so wonderful now that we tend to forget what a horrendous thing
it was to have happened,” [back then Governor Michael] Dukakis recalled
recently. “The wearing of police uniforms always bothered me, and then the
SEEMING difficulty of being able to identify them.”

Hawley too, he said, has shared with him and his wife, Kitty, a very close
friend, her frustration that the FBI has been unable to recover any of the
stolen pieces. “She’s frustrated, HIGHLY SKEPTICAL about a lot of the stuff,”
he said. “She’s gotten tired with everything. Enough already.” from Master
Thieves by Stepehn Kurkjian

Dear Washington: Enough already!!!

This was not made public until 2013:

"We also were threatened by criminals who WANTED attention from the FBI
Nobody knew really what kind of a cauldron we were in." Anne Hawley
12/4/13https://youtu.be/WwnQs1BvvlU?t=44

What kind of criminals WANT attention from the FBI?

I don't know what kind of cauldron we're in, but from the smell of it, I think
I know what it is we're sharing it with.

Who cares? I mean it is bad, but they already know who did
it. This seems like a diversionary, gaslighting, in-emergency-break-glass,
non-story designed to regain control of the narrative by pumping up pointless
data with media steroids and pumping it out into the information stream on
this.

CNN was somehow compelled or persuaded to re-write an article about the Gardner
Heist reward being doubled to ten million written by Charney. They didn't
acknowledge any errors, but they did put in this disclaimer:

You can see Charney on American Greed Season Two Episode Nine "Unsolved:
$300 Million Art Heist / Preying On Faith" on Hulu matter of factly
contradicting the FBI's Geoff Kelly who appears on the same episode to discuss
the Gardner Heist https://www.hulu.com/watch/46551#i0,p5,d0

Then on Friday Emily Rooney smeared Charney at the end of the show, describing
this established art theft expert incompletely as an art novelist, and one who
is indifferent to facts, and whose original story had "ten egregious
errors." But Rooney has not said what any of the errors were and CNN is
not doing a correction. So all we have for egregious errors in the public
domain is Rooney's description of Noah Charney's professional background,
character and ability to render facts on paper for a news story. https://youtu.be/jmfXv-MT8nM?t=344

And the Gardner Heist story is one place where this rivalry is playing itself
out. It is a prelude to what appears to be just how things are going to be for
a while and getting rid of Trump is not going to solve it.

Charney's story (the current version) suggests that raising the reward is an
act of desperation. One thing we know is that the suggestion of a Boston Globe
editorial from the time of 25th anniversary is unlikely to be considered no
matter how hopeless things get in this 27 year old saga:

Himself a former trafficker of stolen art, Turbo Paul Hendry M.A. provides information to the readers of his blogs (including collectors, victims, insurers, and other members of the public) regarding the latest news from the world of stolen art and artifacts and, wherever possible, he assists in the recovery of art and artifacts stolen by others. Art Hostage, for the last Ten years, has provided services to private individuals, insurers, law enforcement agencies, and to those who have information that will lead to the recovery of stolen art.